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Tag: windows

September is traditionally the time in which the two biggest players in the smartphone market release (or at least announce) their newest flagship phones to the masses.

Apple is due to announce the new iPhone 8 range of phones on September 12th, whereas Samsung is releasing the new Galaxy Note 8 a few days later. Over the past couple of years, I’ve really struggled to move to Android and have always returned to iOS. When I got the Galaxy Note 7, I absolutely loved that phone, but the whole battery/recall situation was unpleasant enough (which also took me to the Galaxy S7 Edge and Google Pixel XL) that I just bit the bullet and went back to an iPhone. Earlier this year I had a brief encounter with the Galaxy S8+, but one of my most valued (and most used) applications kept crashing under Android and that forced me back to the iPhone – again.

Right now I’m thinking the best strategy would simply to keep using the iPhone 7 Plus that I have and wait it out until later next year to see what’s happened between the Note 8 and iPhone 8. But I really like the look of the Note 8 – it’s square shape, the S-Pen and the dual cameras (both of which feature optical image stabilisation – a first for any smartphone) all appeal. I liked that I could jot down phone numbers or write notes when the screen was off with the Note 7. That’s great value to me. With the iPhone 8, I stay within the Apple ecosystem with the Apple Watch and the MacBook Pro 2017 Kaby Lake (13″).

Speaking of the MacBook Pro, I decided that, as I will be occasionally working from home with my new job (which is going great, BTW – there’s a LOT to keep me occupied) to buy myself a monitor. I’ve been using laptops almost exclusively close to nearly 15 years, and I’d never thought about buying an external monitor to use with them. Back at Memset, I had a single monitor (21″) that kept me going for 5 years (whereas colleagues had multiple monitors) that I hooked up to my MacBook Air. It was okay, and as such, I felt that I didn’t really need that sort of set-up at home. This new job, on the other hand, gives me two 21″ monitors out the box on a desktop based Ubuntu OS (it was running Windows).

So last week, having endured two weeks where I had to work at least one day per week at home due to the South Western Railway signal/Waterloo upgrade situation, I decided that what I really needed to be able to work comfortably at home with a trillion SSH sessions going on, a web browser or three, and a Slack session all running at the same time was a monitor. I had a look at Ultra HD/4K monitors and ruled them out due to cost. I think it may be another year or two before costs are driven down. So I had a look at a decent 21-24″ full HD monitor that would be both cost-effective and last me for a couple of years (or more).

I looked at a Samsung curved monitor, then ruled that out as it looked too odd. Then there was the LG 25UM58-P-25 21:9 aspect ratio ultra-wide monitor, which looks incredible, but I wondered if it would fit on my desk. I finally settled down on a Dell 2418H InfinityEdge display from John Lewis. £200. It’s a lovely display and comes with its own speakers (tuned by Waves Maxx Audio) that sit within the stand. The quality of the image is fantastic. Yes, you can see the pixels in text given that it’s only a Full HD display and the Mac is capable of driving much higher resolutions – but for my needs it’s perfectly fine (the laptop screen runs at 1600×900 and this display runs at 1980×1080 – then when you combine both screens, I have substantially more real screen estate to play with now).

I also had to buy a new dongle for the Mac because of Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports don’t allow me to directly hook up to an external monitor without one. I settled for a Cable Matters USB-C to 4K HDMI multiport adapter. This also gives me a gigabit ethernet port and two USB 3 ports. And it works brilliantly. It also works with my Dell XPS 13 (9350) too.

Speaking of the Dell XPS 13 9350, I think it may be time to say goodbye to the only decent Windows machine I’ve used in the past year. Dell is just about to refresh the line with the brand spanking new 8th generation Intel processors which bring quad core processing to 13″ notebooks for the very first time. So if anybody is looking out for a very good Windows laptop with 16Gb RAM and 1Tb SSD, and still carries an on-site warranty until 2019 – please get in touch (details in the About Martyn page – link on the left).

So I dusted off my Dell XPS 9350 laptop yesterday to check out the improvements of the Windows 10 Creators Update. As I have not touched the thing in many months, there were many, many updates previously that had to be applied. That alone took about 2 hours, including updating the BIOS and other Dell related software. Why after all these years is Windows so slow at downloading and applying updates? There was one point it was taking so long (30 minutes+) to apply the updates prior to reboot I had to manually power off the laptop and switch it back on again.

Then there was the hassle of getting the Creators Update. It didn’t show up in the Windows Updates list, so I have to hunt around for the Windows Update Assistant which did the job for me. The time spent dealing with this and the other stuff took another 2 hours.

Now, ordinarily, a user wouldn’t leave updates for several months – not after the mess of security flaws we’ve seen hit the news headlines. But even so, to have to go through all the steps I had to go through to get things up to date – it should NOT take four hours to do it. And my XPS is no slouch – 16Gb RAM with 1Tb SSD with SkyLake i7 processor is not to be sniffed at.

If there is anything I would beg of Microsoft – please improve the update process. Make it easier for customers to upgrade to the latest releases in a single process rather than lots of little ones. And the fewer reboots as a result of that would be just grand.

Windows Servers. What a load of old tosh. The past three weeks or so have seen me tinkering unnecessarily with the blasted things because of Microsoft’s inability to write an operating system which is so super sensitive to hardware changes – principally because of licensing – that just by upgrading underlying virtualisation software triggers the operating system to think it has a new network card. You can imagine the chaos something like that can cause!

It’s not just that which makes me despise Windows Server. For similar reasons, if a dedicated server chassis dies and needs to be swapped out – you’d better have a spare because any hardware changes will cause Windows to freak out. Linux has no problem with such things providing you’re using a modern distribution and reasonably up to date hardware. Generally speaking, with maybe a very few exceptions, Linux Just Works(tm).

The whole WCry situation around these parts has been, strangely, pretty good – indeed, a lot more people have taken an interest in their backups and patching their systems and this is only to be commended. A good old major outbreak tends to kick people in the teeth and get them thinking about disaster recovery.

Just because I use MacOS and Linux isn’t making me complacent – oh no. Very recently Apple just released updates to iOS, MacOS and WatchOS to fix a rather nasty exploit, as well as general performance updates. It’s one of the reasons I went back to iOS – Apple has become very good at rolling out updates much faster and on schedule than the likes of Samsung.

The server on which this blog runs on utilises something called KernelCare which patches the kernel in real time for newly discovered exploits. This has the advantage of:

Not having to wait for the OS vendor to release a patch.

You don’t have to reboot the machine.

In my testing of KernelCare, it has worked very well. If you’re using it in a VPS, it must support full virtualisation – paravirtualisation won’t cut it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft should stick to producing office productivity software and gaming (Xbox One) – it’s what they’re good at. I’ve completely lost faith in their desktop and server operating system divisions.

Oh, Apple. What an enormous pain in the bottom you are at times! Nearly four months away, and I return to discover that your software is just as buggy as when I left. But, when it works, is infinitely better than that offered for and by Windows / Microsoft. The last straw was when I created a spreadsheet in Excel 2016 on the Dell UHD laptop, only to find that due to dodgy Windows scaling, the row sizes were all over the shop when the same file was opened on a Mac also running Excel 2016.

Importing 8,163 photos and videos into Photos caused Photos to crash half way through. Thankfully as Adobe Lightroom organises photos by year, I did one year at a time and everything is now inside the Photos ecosystem.

Restoring iTunes to a new machine (regardless of platform) while you have an Apple Music subscription is the biggest load of nonsense I have ever encountered from any software company ever. All seemed to go well – iTunes picked up the freshly copied Windows iTunes folder and organised/consolidated it as it should. But, alas, while Apple Music was switched on and signed in, iTunes told me otherwise. A workaround was to browse and/or play something directly from the Apple Music catalogue web site (within iTunes – iTunes essentially acts a glorified browser), then offline stuff could play. In an attempt to fix the problem once and for all, I turned iCloud Music Library Off (and Apple Music) and switched them back on. Big mistake. As soon as that happened, iTunes attempted to reupload music and match, resulting in the duplication of all Apple Music albums and tracks. At least some 2,000+. Sorting out the duplicates in the Gilbert & Sullivan 450 track multi-disc album was, to say the least, [censored] annoying. This was even after nuking the entire iTunes library and letting everything (inc. matched non-Apple tracks and iTunes purchased tracks) download again from Apple’s servers. This incident has made me extremely nervous of ever having to restore an iTunes library from a backup. Maybe Apple is promoting Apple Music’s strength as an online service that you really never need to back up to anything other than their servers? *shrugs*

Playing Team Fortress 2 using the AMD Radeon R9 370X is fine and dandy, but things went a bit wonky straight after Steam/TF2 installation, with TF2 and Steam quitting immediately as soon as the game started. Restarting MacOS seems to fix it.

Switching to Apple’s Two Factor Authentication was a pain too. If you had Two Step Authentication, you have to disable that, create a new series of security questions, then wait a bit before the Two Factor Authentication settings pop up on the iPhone or iPad. Trying to get the Apple TV to recognise HomeKit involved logging in and out about six times before it finally worked. Lots of logging in and out across all devices overall. Apple Watch needed a reboot to get the MacOS unlock functionality working, else the system complained that it couldn’t find the watch.

Otherwise, I am enjoying the Retina display, the quad core processor, and super fast SSD drive. I’ve come to the conclusion that Windows is not ready for 4K/UHD and above displays. Not until software developers start making the use of it.

But I will remain a Mac/iPhone/iPad user for the foreseeable future. The alternative is good, but for me – and despite all the problems with Apple’s software division – it’s not enough. Apple have won. I surrender.